


The Indian Serenade

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Dead Poets Society (1989)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-20
Updated: 2005-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:22:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1633694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charlie hears a different music, Knox listens, and everything changes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Indian Serenade

**Author's Note:**

> Written for pocky_slash

 

 

 _My cheek is cold and white, alas!_  
My heart beats loud and fast;--  
Oh! press it to thine own again,  
Where it will break at last.  
\-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

The old Indian cave was farther than Knox had remembered the second time he picked his way there, flashlight-courage keeping his feet moving in the heavy dark. He'd enjoyed the first trip, sure--the adrenaline born of sneaking out, all of them crowded together in the damp chill--but everything had been so _frenetic_ that the whole experience had been reduced to a blurred kaleidoscope in his mind.

This, though...this was different. Charlie had asked Knox to come tonight, scaring him awake with a hand over his mouth and a hissed "Knoxious!" In the next bed Knox's roommate, a chubby boy named Roger, had snored blissfully on, unaware that a wild-eyed heathen had entered the room.

"What say we go back to the cave tonight, just you and me?" Charlie said, and Knox could tell, even through the tatters of sleep and the dim hall light creeping under the door, that Charlie _really_ liked the idea. That meant that would be no dissuading him. Charlie, once set on a thing, was as unlikely to be diverted as a thunderstorm.

"But we just went," Knox whispered as Charlie removed his hand.

Charlie made a supremely disdainful noise. "Too much noise. Couldn't hear the music."

"What music?" Knox said, already sitting up.

"The music that's there, of course," Charlie replied, a bit overloud, in his best that's-supremely-obvious voice.

Roger rolled over and pulled the covers up tighter, mumbling in his sleep, so Knox put a finger to his lips and dressed quickly.

Once he was properly ensconced in flannel, Knox followed Charlie on tiptoe down the darkened hall. There were no dog biscuits left for tonight, but Charlie had thought to wrap up a bit of corned beef from dinner and that, as it turned out, was more than adequate to placate Cicero. The elderly black watchdog gobbled it happily, making no more noise than two tail-thumps on the landing, and then Knox and Charlie were down the stairs and out into the cold, free air.

The moon was no more than a quarter full, waxing palest yellow above the treetops. Once or twice Knox thought they might be lost, picking their way through the woods without benefit of Neil's directions. But eventually Charlie signaled that they were there, and Knox recognized the sharp outcropping of rock that the underbrush couldn't quite cover.

Knox shivered as they entered the cave. It was a great relief to be out of the wind, but the temperature inside the cave seemed colder, refrigerator-like.

"Cold?" Charlie asked, and Knox nodded. "Don't worry, I've got just the stuff." From his jacket pocket Charlie extracted a gleaming silver flask. It glinted like wicked morse code when Knox's flashlight struck it.

"What is it?" Knox asked, although he had a fairly good notion already. "Where'd you get it?"

"Whiskey," Charlie said with a huge grin. He unscrewed the top and knocked back a big slug. "Courtesy of McAlister's desk drawer. _Poto, potare, potavi, potatus._ "

"Charlie! You _didn't,_ " Knox said, clearly scandalized. "You'll get expelled."

Charlie smiled again and passed the flask to Knox, who wasn't so scandalized that he refused it. "Have to get caught first. I'll stick it back first thing tomorrow when he goes to smoke his pipe. He'll never know the difference."

Knox wasn't at all certain about the validity of that theory, but he didn't want to argue with Charlie. Instead, he tilted the whiskey back, choking on a swallow that burned his throat like a honeyed torch.

"Good stuff, yeah?" Charlie said, slapping Knox congenially (if a bit hard) on the back, and Knox had to agree that it was.

After they had drunk a bit more of the whiskey, Knox did feel a little warmer, but he was still having a hard time repressing shivers; he wasn't sure how Charlie was coping so well, since his jacket was only a light windbreaker. The first trip had only been three days ago, but the temperature had dropped precipitously since then, one of those sudden New England shifts that hinted of snow to come despite the still-golden leaves.

As if reading Knox's thoughts, Charlie began rubbing his arms. "I'd say it's about time for a fire, wouldn't you?"

"Didn't work last time," Knox pointed out. "The wood was too damp to light, remember?"

Charlie looked pained and put his hand over his heart. "And what kind of confidence are you showing that I, Charles Dalton, former Boy Scout extraordinaire, will be able to provide?"

Knox laughed out loud. "You? _You_ were a Boy Scout?" he said, but he was already talking to Charlie's back, disappearing out of the cave.

Knox thought perhaps he should go help Charlie, but the idea of going back out in the wind was not at all appealing. He glanced over to where Charlie had been sitting and saw the flask, shining like a silver tortoise.

 _Well, one more won't hurt,_ Knox thought, unscrewing the cap.

He'd no more than taken another shot when Charlie reentered the cave, much quicker than Knox had anticipated. He was carrying a large bundle of some sort, wrapped up in one of the nondescript gray Welton blankets.

"That was fast," Knox said. His eyes were still watering a little from the whiskey, but he was thinking he might just learn to like the stuff. With practice, of course.

"Always prepared," Charlie replied, unrolling the blanket to reveal a good armful of nice, dry wood. "I scavenged it yesterday, stashed it under that rock overhang near the cave entrance."

"Very impressive," Knox said. "Whose blanket is that?"

"Cameron's," Charlie said, and then he laughed, and Knox laughed too, delighted in the joke that didn't need to be explained. Cameron would no doubt have already turned the room upside down looking for it, and had most likely moved on to an elaborate conspiracy theory involving Charlie, Mr. Keating, and Russian Nationals.

The whiskey was most assuredly going to Knox's head, and he was content to sit back and watch Charlie do quite an expert job of starting the fire (with matches, Knox noted with some disappointment--he'd hoped for the drama of two sticks rubbing faster and faster). It filtered through the pleasant haze that Charlie had gone to a lot of trouble beforehand, but what of that? It didn't hit Knox just how _much_ trouble until Charlie moved another blanket Knox hadn't noticed from the corner of the cave, revealing his set of bongos.

"You brought your drums," Knox observed.

"I did," Charlie agreed, and spread the blanket out so that he and Knox could sit on it, which Knox had to admit was a damn sight better than the cold cave floor. Then Charlie took the flask back from Knox ("think I need to catch up a bit,") and did another shot before settling the drums between his legs.

Knox waited anxiously, but Charlie just sat there with his eyes closed for several minutes. At last Knox couldn't take the suspense any longer.

"Well?"

"Well what?" Charlie asked, cracking open an eye to peer at Knox.

"Aren't you going to play something?"

"I was trying to hear the music, but something's off," Charlie said, and then he frowned. "Wait...I think I know."

"What?" Knox asked, but Charlie didn't answer. He was too busy stripping off his jacket and his blue Oxford.

"Charlie, what-- ?" Knox began, at a distinct loss for words as Charlie sat there, bare-chested, his skin pebbling into pale gooseflesh like a marble statue that had awakened and realized it was cold.

"That's more like it," Charlie said, and he closed his eyes again, but this time he began drumming. The sound of his palms slapping the taut leather filled Knox's ears, _THUP-thup-thup,_ rhythm like the beat of an alien heart, echoing and magnifying in the hollow cave.

The firelight cast golden shadows on Charlie's skin, threw darker ones behind him on the cave wall. In the swirling smoke and flickering light Knox stared at Charlie, entranced.

Charlie looked like a god.

It wasn't a thought Knox had ever had before, but the newness of it didn't stop him from thinking it now. Then Charlie snapped his eyes open, burning black and sharp right through Knox, and the thought turned into _Christ, he's beautiful._

Knox opened his mouth, but whatever he was going to blurt out was mercifully cut short when Charlie reached over and grabbed his hand.

"Here," Charlie said, putting Knox's hand on one of the drums. "Listen. Feel it."

The skin of the drum shivered beneath Knox's fingertips as Charlie struck it, and Knox closed his eyes. The rhythm was catching him up, shifting into something darker, faster. He heard it, and whatever objections Knox's ever-anxious brain might have come up with were drowned out as he gave himself up to the music and joined in.

 _Beat. Beat. Beat._ Together their hands flew, rhythm and polyrhythm, Charlie leading and Knox answering, until Knox felt dizzy from the acrid smoke and the unrelenting throb of the drums.

Then Charlie did something completely unexpected, even for Charlie. He leaned over and kissed Knox, who was so stunned that he forgot to quit drumming, his hand skittering like a rabbit's foot across the drum-top, warning of danger.

Charlie kissed him hard, forcing Knox's lips apart and sliding his tongue inside Knox's mouth. Knox had kissed a girl, once--not the longed-for Chris, not yet--but this was nothing like that had been. Charlie's lips were slightly rough, and he tasted like bourbon and faintly of pipe-smoke. He kissed like a wild thing, and Knox found himself kissing back.

When he fell backwards, driven by a terrible ache to pull Charlie on top of him, Knox saw that their shadows on the cave wall commingled into feral satyrs who tore at each other, muscle and rank, mad bone.

And soon after, when Knox came hard, eyes closed, grinding against the rock-hard bulge at Charlie's groin, he saw that the fire illumined the veins in his eyelids blood red.

****

They did not talk about it the next day, or the day after. Sometimes Knox wondered if he hadn't dreamed up the whole thing, but then he would touch the bruises on the small of his back, lick the place where the inside of his bottom lip had split under Charlie's onslaught, and he would know better.

The only thing that changed, really, is that Charlie took to talking about girls at every given opportunity. This was generally considered in character, and no one else remarked on it. Knox thought that he could hear a thinly strident note in Charlie's voice, though, especially whenever Chris was mentioned. When Knox called her, and she invited him to the party, Charlie was the only one openly skeptical. _You don't really think she means you're going with her._

But Knox did think it, and later, when his nose was dripping blood onto the Danbury's carpet, he felt something turn over inside of him, something wild and determined.

****

The evening of Neil's play, Knox stood there in the snow and convinced Chris to accompany him. He wasn't nervous--indeed, he sounded as confident as he felt--and at length she fell in beside him, a tiny blonde bird tucked under his arm like a beautiful secret.

Not nervous, but as he walked, listening to her speak in high, clear tones, occasionally catching a whiff of her perfume (lily of the valley, soft as a dream of spring), Knox felt a strange longing. He knew without question that this was the woman he would marry, and a lifetime spread before his vision--a fine brick house, beautiful children, a string of pearls for Chris for their anniversary. Everything ordered, everything right.

Except that when Knox closed his eyes, the white world beat red in time with his pulse, and he could just catch the echo of vanishing drums.

 


End file.
